Documentary Review: ‘The Pathological Optimist’

Is there a link between autism and the MMR vaccine? Director Miranda Bailey spent five years with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, one of 13 physicians who co-authored a paper that started the anti-vaccination movement. The Pathological Optimist is the result, and there is no better precis of the matter to date.

In making the film, Bailey clearly tried hard to be unbiased, but the truth is that Dr. Wakefield has no small personal charm, his wife Carmel is a strong and admirable woman, and the kids (who appear only briefly) garner some sympathy as innocents in the whole situation. The result is a film that tells the truth, nothing but the truth, but somehow slants the truth further in Wakefield’s favor than I think he deserves.

Consider the graphic that notes, between 1999 (after the infamous paper) and 2014 (when the filming was finished), more than 100 scientific studies failed to demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Not a single study found such a link. Yet, this is saved for the last quarter of the film. Open the documentary with that fact, and one’s take on Dr. Wakefield would be entirely different. No rational person would entertain the idea that he is a brave crusader for truth; instead, one would consider him a charlatan or self-deluded.

That said, Bailey has more than done her homework in getting the facts to the view in easily digestible form. The average person (and especially the average non-British person) doesn’t know the finer points of the practice medicine and medical research in the UK, nor of the law of subject matter jurisdiction in the State of Texas (where Wakefield has resided for years). Yet one never feels lost in the telling of the tale.

As she tells that tale, Bailey uncovers some wonderfully human moments of a family under fire. Early on in the film as he is driving his son to school, Wakefield asks the boy if he believes the things he hears about his father in the media. Perhaps the question was staged, but the son’s answer “Only the good stuff” shines as a teenager’s truth. Later, Carmel explains to their daughter, who is going away to college, that they will have moved to a newer, smaller, affordable home when she comes back for Christmas. Both put on a brave face, but the tears are genuine and perfectly legitimate.

The British journalist Brian Deer is Wakefield’s nemesis in all of this, having won serious accolades (and a prize or two) for his work in debunking Wakefield’s research and anti-vaccination activities. He appears only through publicly available video and declined to participate in the project. This is entirely understandable, but at the same time, it weakens “The Perpetual Optimist.” The animosity Wakefield holds for him is almost palpable. At one stage, he refuses to even visit Deer’s website. “Never have, never will.” Deer’s collaboration was probably beyond hoping for, but it would have been a major plus.

With Wakefield’s own film “Vaxxed” being pulled from the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, and with its premier in the UK done almost in secret, Bailey’s “The Perpetual Optimist” more than fills the void. And despite some clear affinity (affection?) for Wakefield and his humanity, I would say it’s also likely to be a fairer representation of Wakefield and the MMR/autism controversy.

Wakefield isn’t a monster, nor is he a hero. He is a man who made a dreadful mistake and can’t bring himself to acknowledge it. Bailey shows the result of that inability with crystal clarity.

I think everybody who knows the truth….which you forget to mention is that Wakefield aS ratcheted by Deer…..who was on hire from Rupert Murdoch’s Times. Murdoch’s son James was on board at GlaxoSmithKline…a huge conflict of interest. Wakefield was a top gastro surgeon…..when waves of vaccine damaged kids referred to him. Literally his team were the first at the scene when GPS had no clue what to do with all these children with severe gut issues. His team scoped their stomachs and found the vaccine strain of measles permanently residing in their gut. He was helping these kids….he simply stated that return to single measles jab needed. The paper also stated that it was the parents note that their child became autistic after the MMR vaccine. Not one parent complained about Wakefield. However Wakefields team disbanded…..kids being helped all told to go back to gp care…..cover Up ensued all to protect the MMR.

Wakefield patented his own MMR vaccine. He’s a fear mongering, unethical liar who ought to be held financially liable for all the cases of measles he’s helped cause. Vaccines are not linked to autism. There’s certainly no need to force kids to get three shots rather than one.

You need to do your research properly Stacy – Wakefield did not try to patent a MMR vaccine By MMR I presume you mean the patent for Transfer Factor which is a naturally occurring nutritional supplement that occurs in breast milk, It boosts the immune response to an infection like measles. This could not prevent children from getting measles, so it didn’t act like MMR at all. What it did was to help them clear the virus once they became infected. It could never have competed with MMR vaccine. Never, because it did not work in the right way.”

The patent did state it could possibly be a safer measles vaccine – in patentland everything possible is listed. But the technology could never be used as a true measles vaccine. How could Wakefield compete against the MMR vaccine – not possible and he knew it. It was Deer who locked onto this to make Wakefield look bad.

Dr. Wakefield IS A HERO. Period. And what about the fact that Dr. William Thompson, top CDC scientist, confessed that he was ordered to destroy the evidence in a study showing that the MMR DID cause autism????

Dr Wakefield was not anti vaccine and in fact advocated for vaccination against measles. Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet study was coauthored by 12 other scientists and b) the paper made no such conclusion whatsoever between MMR and autism. However his suspicions have been proven correct: Check out VAXXED.
“My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998,” Thompson stated in August 2014 on the law firm’s website. “I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.”